Hero who fell from grace

Saul David reviews Galloper Jack by Brough Scott

By Saul David

12:01AM BST 29 May 2003

"Galloper" Jack Seely was many things: pampered son of a rich industrialist, confidant of Winston Churchill, decorated war hero, senior Cabinet Minister and, ultimately, misguided elder statesman. And yet few remember him today. Why? Because, unlike Churchill, he blotted his copybook by his enthusiastic support for Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s.

Born in 1868, the younger son of Sir Charles "Pig" Seely MP who had made his fortune selling pig iron to the Royal Navy, Jack was brought up on the Isle of Wight. According to Brough Scott - his grandson - he had at least 14 near death experiences. One of the earliest was in 1891 when, as a member of the local lifeboat, he swam through a storm-tossed sea to save the crew of a foundering French ship.

Such extreme acts of courage - both physical and moral - were a constant theme in Seely's life. In 1900, while serving in the Boer War with the Hampshire Yeomanry, he refused an order to abandon two troops of his men who were fighting a desperate rearguard action. Though reprimanded by a court-martial, he was congratulated for the "efficient manner" of his defence and was later awarded the DSO.

On returning from South Africa in 1901, Seely entered politics. Thanks to the influence of his father and the tireless campaigning of his wife Nim, he had been elected in absentia as Conservative MP for the Isle of Wight in the "Khaki" Election of 1900. And yet he, like Churchill (another former soldier who first entered Parliament as a Tory in 1900), had marked Liberal sympathies. Within four years, both had crossed the Floor of the House. They became rising stars in successive Liberal governments and by 1912 were Cabinet colleagues: Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty and Seely as Secretary of State for War.

Seely's luck was the first to turn. In August 1913 his wife died in childbirth. Nine months later, he was forced to resign from government over the so-called "Curragh Incident", when British officers refused to march into Ulster to coerce armed Protestants opposed to the Home Rule Bill. Scott gives a balanced account of the episode and concludes, with some justification, that Seely was a convenient scapegoat.

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He served for most of the First World War as commander of a Canadian cavalry brigade. "To the outsider," writes Scott, "they looked a displaced, half-trained, makeshift bunch of ranchers, clerks, cowboys, ex-pats, mounties and Red Indians." But they and Seely were "made for each other".

Together they saw action at Festubert, the Somme, Passchendaele and Cambrai. But their crowning glory came during the great German offensive of March 1918 - also known as The Kaiser's Battle - when they stormed the strategically vital position of Moreuil Wood. Legend has it that one charge, led by Captain Flowerdew (who was awarded a posthumous VC), killed 70 Germans "by sword thrust alone"- though Scott is more circumspect, commenting that "the assault, although repulsed, both broke the balance of the German defence inside the wood and stopped . . . their stream of reinforcements".

After the war Seely made a brief political comeback as Churchill's deputy at the War Office. But he resigned in 1919 over the government's refusal to set up a separate air ministry and, though he remained an MP until 1924, his political career was effectively over. He kept busy as Chairman of the National Savings Movement (for which he received a peerage) and was instrumental in the setting up of an all-party National Government in 1931.

But all these achievements were overshadowed by his unabashed admiration for fascism. He visited both Italy and Germany in the 1930s and opposed Churchill's demand for rearmament on the ground that Hitler was "absolutely truthful, sincere and unselfish".

He continued to support appeasement in Parliament as late as June 1939, long after it was obvious that Hitler could not be trusted, and only changed tack once the Second World War had begun. Scott explains but does not excuse: "Avoiding another conflict at almost any cost had become another Seely certainty . . . This time his certainty had led him seriously astray."

In seeking to resurrect the memory of his extraordinary grandfather, Brough Scott has written a wry, affectionate and far from partial biography. As a well-known sports journalist, his prose might be a little colloquial and quirky for some - exclamation marks abound as does the first person pronoun - but the story of Seely's life is never less than compelling.